Classic Books to Try on Audio

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

Beloved

Pulitzer Prize Winner

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. 

This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.

Sethe... Read more

The Odyssey

Penguin Audio Classics

By: Homer
Narrated by: Ian McKellen
Length: 13 hours 2 minutes

“Homer's Odyssey was always meant to be heard, not read. This is the best translation with the best reader. Accept no substitutes. Read more

The Count of Monte Cristo

By: Alexandre Dumas
Narrated by: Richard Matthews
Length: 43 hours 13 minutes

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

A popular bestseller since its publication in 1844, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the great page-turning thrillers of all time. Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas’s grand historical romance recounts the swashbuckling... Read more

Les Miserables

By: Victor Hugo
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 60 hours 27 minutes

One of the great classics of world literature and the inspiration for the most beloved stage musical of all time, Les MisErables is legendary author Victor Hugo's masterpiece. This extraordinary English version by renowned translator Julie Rose captures all the majesty and brilliance of Hugo's work. Here is the timeless story of the... Read more

Passing

By: Nella Larsen
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 4 hours 5 minutes

Nella Larsen’s fascinating exploration of race and identity—the inspiration for the Netflix film directed by Rebecca Hall, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga.Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her... Read more

Rebecca

By: Daphne du Maurier
Narrated by: Anna Massey
Length: 14 hours 48 minutes

“Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier is my go-to rainy day book. Despite the ambiguity gothic novels thrive on, the characters in Rebecca were fully fleshed out and the haunted manor is beautifully described. It's slow moving at first, but once the tension builds, you'll have a hard time putting it down. Read more

Frankenstein

or The Modern Prometheus

By: Mary Shelley
Narrated by: Anthony Heald, Stefan Rudnicki & Simon Templeman
Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

This special unabridged, multivoiced production of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece of nineteenth-century Gothic horror is narrated by film and television star Anthony Heald, joined by Grammy winner Stefan Rudnicki and actor Simon Templeman, under the direction of award-winning audio producer Yuri Rasovsky.Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious young... Read more

Pride and Prejudice

By: Jane Austen
Narrated by: Carolyn Seymour
Length: 11 hours 28 minutes

“No matter how many times I return to this book, something new always stands out: a delightful quip or a reference I didn’t catch before. This is the ultimate comfort read and it never fails to cheer me up. Read more

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

By: Anne Brontë
Narrated by: Alex Jennings & Jenny Agutter
Length: 16 hours 24 minutes

Helen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband.Although... Read more

Middlemarch

By: George Eliot
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 35 hours 35 minutes

Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored:... Read more

Vanity Fair

By: William Makepeace Thackeray
Narrated by: Georgina Sutton
Length: 32 hours 15 minutes

Vanity Fair, with its rich cast of characters, takes place on the snakes-and-ladders board of life. Amelia Sedley, daughter of a wealthy merchant, has a loving mother to supervise her courtship. Becky Sharp, an orphan, has to use her wit, charm, and resourcefulness to escape from her destiny as a governess. This she does ruthlessly, musing: ‘I... Read more

Northanger Abbey

By: Jane Austen
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman’s daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of ‘Gothic novels’ by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and... Read more

To the Lighthouse

By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 7 hours 38 minutes

Just before the First World War, the Ramsay family go to their holiday home in the Hebrides, bringing several guests with them. While they are there, one of the children wants to visit a lighthouse. After a ten year gap, during which the war wreaks its havoc on Europe, one of the guests returns to the house; and another trip to the lighthouse is... Read more